


Foundling

by wordsrising



Series: the Shifting Bones [1]
Category: Flight Rising
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Interspecies Adoption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:09:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23828128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordsrising/pseuds/wordsrising
Summary: Forging a new way of life is difficult, but opens up possibilities the old way would never have allowed.
Series: the Shifting Bones [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2034121
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Foundling

Heskaa wound her tail in anxious coils, taking comfort in the soft whispering hiss of scale over scale over dirt. She did not consider herself a nervous snake - tried not to consider herself a snake at all, but old shunning died hard in minds as old as hers - but she always found the wait while the night’s point scouted out the trail ahead trying. Her bones were too old to take the job herself, but she thought that the strain would be preferable to the interminable _waiting_.

Finally, after a handful of minutes long enough to fill a week of nights, the sharp hiss of Kenshe’s all-clear sounded, and Heskaa could force her tail to relax.

Hikka and Tsani surged forward with as much apparent impatience as Heskaa felt, and she had to catch their arms and flick the tip of her tail at their hips to slow them down. They were the youngest of the sect and just shy of grown, and the softness of their stolen existence meant they were not as cautious as they should be.

Hikka hissed and grumbled at her, but Tsani mumbled an apology, and they both slowed enough to satisfy her, so she released them to follow the others.

Sliding down the side of a shallow hill, Heskaa at first took the sound for the wind; the cursed Wastes were a dead and sickly place, and the wind here often sounded like faint screams and lamentations to Heskaa. She heard and acknowledged it, then tried her best to ignore it. It seemed to grow louder, and she ignored it harder as Tsani helped her down into a dry gully.

“What _is_ that?” Hikka demanded softly, pulling at the hood of her cloak as if it might block the sound better.

“The wind?” Tsani suggested, but he sounded unsure.

“Too constant for wind,” Kenshe disagreed, looming from the dark. He was nearly as young as Tsani and Hikka, but much more mature, and spoke with much greater certainty. “An animal, maybe.”

“Is it hurt?” Hikka asked. “It’s been ages since we had meat.”

“We had meat two days ago,” Tsani reminded her. Hikka stuck her tongue out at him.

“Enough, children,” Heskaa scolded them both. “Can you tell where?”

Kenshe nodded as the sound grew louder, pointing toward a low stand of trees a fair distance away, almost lost in the gloom of the night.

“It sounds like a baby,” Tsani whispered.

“Babies have parents,” Hikka said. “Why haven’t they shut it up?”

Oshkana, who had remained silent until now, inhaled sharply as the wind shifted, just a little. “I smell blood.”

Oshkana’s scenting was by far the best in the sect; try as she might, all Heskaa could smell was dirt. That was no reason to doubt her, though: if Oshkana smelled blood, then blood was there to be smelled.

“We should go look,” Tsani said. “It might need help.”

“Maybe we can eat it,” Hikka added.

“It’s worth checking on either way,” Kenshe said before they could start arguing like common ratsnakes again. “Oshkana, take point.”

Kenshe was not the strongest in the sect, and the old ways would never have allowed him to lead them, but they had cast aside the old ways when the old ways had cast them aside. Kenshe was intelligent, and kind enough to care for the rest of the sect as much as or more than he cared for himself, and this new way they were making meant Oshkana obeyed him without resistance.

With Oshkana ahead and Kenshe behind and Heskaa wrangling the children, they made their way along the gully floor toward the trees and the wailing that sounded more and more desperate and frightened with each passing moment.

It wasn’t long before Heskaa could smell the blood, too. It hung heavy and thick in the night air, cloying and copper-tainted, too much to be from a hunted meal. Too much to belong to anything smaller than a Serthis. Too much to belong to anything only somewhat larger than a Serthis.

There was a camp of sorts beneath the trees, with rough shelters and the embers of a campfire left to burn itself out. Cuts of meat were scattered carelessly across the ground under spatters of blood, broken tree branches, and crushed vegetation. A fight had happened here, a fight that involved at least one of the larger dragon breeds, to judge by the claw marks gouged in the dirt and tree trunks.

The wailing came from inside one of the shelters. A hasty blockade had been piled over the opening, but all of them together had strength enough to move it, letting the last of the firelight spill across the floor and the dragon nest there.

The wailing came from a dragon. It was already as large as Oshkana, nearly as large as Hikka and Tsani put together, but bits of shell still clung wetly to its hide, fresh-broken shell cracking in the nest beneath it. If Heskaa knew her eggs, she would say the thing had hatched moments before she first heard its wailing.

“It’s a dragon,” Hikka breathed in wonder, peering around the edge of the shelter threshold.

The dragon pulled itself forward on shaky limbs, unfurling fragile-looking wings, and it continued to wail even as it toppled over the edge of the nest. It would have landed directly on its face, but Heskaa’s old bones could still move fast when it mattered, and Tsani had too much kindness in him, and between them they managed to catch the dragon and set it on the ground more-or-less upright.

“How do we make it shut up?” Hikka asked.

“We could kill it,” Oshkana said. “It won’t last on its own.”

Heskaa glanced up at Oshkana and past her to Kenshe. To leave it behind would be cruel, cruel as their birth sects had been to them, but… Heskaa wasn’t certain she could kill an infant. Not even an infant dragon. Not even as an act of mercy.

“None of us would, either,” Tsani spoke up, running his hands along the dragon’s face and neck in an attempt to soothe it. “Last on our own, I mean.”

“We can’t leave it,” Hikka protested.

Tsani hesitated a long moment as the dragon attempted to fit itself into his lap. When he spoke again, his voice shook slightly, but not with uncertainty. “We could take it with us.”

“It’s not Serthis,” Oshkana said, frowning.

“Neither are we, according to most Serthis,” Tsani replied. “If it doesn’t deserve help, why did we?”

Heskaa sighed. Tsani really was too kind, and she didn’t doubt his kindness would be his end one day, but there was no denying his point.

“We can’t take it anywhere with all that noise,” Kenshe said. Heskaa noticed - and she was sure Tsani did, too - that he wasn’t saying no.

“It’s just hatched,” Tsani said. “It’s probably hungry. I’ll feed it.”

Hikka vanished and returned in a moment brushing dirt off a chunk of meat, holding it out. The dragon sniffed at it, then shoved her hand away with its beak and continued to wail.

Tsani looked about in the dim light, then grabbed at what Heskaa had taken for part of the nest. It was instead a mound of flowers and vines; given how the dragon immediately snatched up the ones Tsani offered it, they had probably been set aside by the dragon’s parents in anticipation of its hatching.

By the time the mound was gone, the dragon was mostly dry and able to stand. It followed them unsteadily out of the shelter and into the still night air, Tsani slithering beside it with one hand on its shoulder. Hikka moved ahead of it, grabbing up plants and offering them to the dragon with delight, insisting she would be the fun big sister to Tsani’s inevitable boring big brother.

Heskaa smiled to herself as she helped Oshkana and the others strip whatever useful things could be found in the ruined camp. The children were young and had lived more of their life in this sect than out of it, and they stood as ready rebuttal to any claims about Serthis nature making their brutal way of life necessary. If they could take so easily to an orphaned dragon, they could befriend most anything, and Heskaa refused to believe that was a weakness.

With dawn a faint promise on the horizon, a sect of Serthis and a dragon foundling set out into the Wastes in search of whatever life had in store for them next.


End file.
